Relationship OCD as Doubt-Compulsion Wrong Attractor: The Relational Certainty Demand, Intrusive-Doubt Basin, and the Return to Committed Uncertainty

Relationship OCD (ROCD) — the subtype of OCD in which obsessive doubt targets the intimate relationship itself or the partner's qualities — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_RO in the landscape of committed uncertainty. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as committed uncertainty: the capacity to sustain genuine relational commitment while tolerating the irreducible uncertainty that characterizes all intimate relationships — love as decision and practice, not certainty.

Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: the certainty demand (the belief that genuine love would not produce doubt, transforming normal ambivalence into pathological symptom), the compulsion-rebound cycle (reassurance, mental reviewing, and feeling-checking produce temporary relief but strengthen the doubt through the rebound effect and missed disconfirmation), and significance inflation (intrusive doubts are interpreted as meaningful revelations about relationship quality — the meta-cognitive error that gives doubts their power).

The paradox of review is central: the more the ROCD sufferer mentally reviews their feelings, the less certainty is achieved — subjective feeling states are not reliably accessible through introspection, and the reviewing process itself disrupts natural emotional experience. Nine formal propositions characterize the certainty demand basin, compulsion-rebound cycle, significance inflation, paradox of review, two ROCD subtypes, developmental roots, differential diagnosis from genuine incompatibility, return paths, and cultural amplifiers.